With just four days to go until an eagerly awaited All-Ireland final between hurling’s standard bearers for the past decade and a fearless young Galway side, it’s easy to forget just how many risks Micheál Donoghue and his selectors took to get here. Galway overwhelmed Cork in the semi-finals. Cathal Mannion is one of the front-runners for Hurler of the Year in his deep-lying role, and it would take something remarkable for anyone to overtake Jason Rabbitte as Young Hurler of the Year. Galway’s tactical approach caught Dublin and Cork in their last two outings, but this wasn’t always the case. Dublin sucker-punched them in Salthill, and they fell into double-digit deficits on their road trips to Kildare and Wexford. “The Kildare game and the Wexford games, some of the commentary from the stand was lovely, do you know what I mean?” Donoghue says with a smile – now.“We recognised that we had to have a definite gameplan and change from where we were. And as a management team we put in a lot of work in the off-season – probably the biggest amount of work we’ve ever done on it. “Franny [Francis Forde] is an absolute top coach, and as time goes on he’s just getting better and better. He kept coming back saying, ‘Look, we can do this and do that’. And I think where we got the bounce was we were ready to go when we came back to pre-season.“The lads recognised that we were doing something different; their enthusiasm came from that.”Galway's Cathal Mannion celebrates after beating Cork in the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship semi-final. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho Like all tactics, they were only as good as the players that implement them. And Donoghue, Forde and the Galway management backed themselves. Jason Rabbitte and Aaron Niland, still under-20s, were deployed in key roles up front. Mannion, the second-highest scorer in the 2025 championship and All-Star winner, was cast into a sweeping role where he was often the last man back. “These boys took to it really, really well and once they’re buying into it, they start driving it themselves,” Donoghue says. “We were never going to abandon ship but [when it’s not going well], that’s when you need the group really tight, that everyone trusts it.”And no concern that it might be too much, too soon for some of the younger players? “The messaging is that they’re not going to be judged on their first few years, so to just go out and hurl with that freedom and abandonment, and I think that’s evident.“I was asked if I was shocked with it, but we’ve seen them coming through with underage ranks with Galway and seen a lot of them with their clubs. And they would have been earmarked – most of them – of having the possibility of pushing on. That’s why we brought them in last year to bring them up to speed physically, and they tore into it in the off-season while they were doing it with the club. That gave us a good foothold then when we came back.”As an All-Ireland-winning manager with his native county nine years ago, Donoghue was always likely to be afforded that bit more patience than some others. And he confirms it was always his intention to come back for a second stint and see if he could bring back the heady days of 2017 and 2018, when Galway played in back-to-back finals. [ Limerick v Galway: TV details, throw-in time, team news for All-Ireland hurling finalOpens in new window ]“Definitely,” he says of his plans. “When we left in ’19, we had the opportunity to come back, but at that point in time, it wasn’t right. The Dublin opportunity came, and we just felt at that time it was just a really good opportunity for us, but once you’re back in it, of course you would welcome the opportunity to get back to Galway.“All of us, management and the more experienced fellas, everyone has been really energised with the young fellas since they’ve come in. They’ve forged a great chemistry with these boys and, right from pre-season, it just sort of clicked straight away.”